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Amid the gleaming classic cars and towering combines on display at Maryland’s Carroll County 4-H Fair, I found a bevy of voters to talk to. I was curious if they thought that President Joe Biden is still running the country. Nobody said yes. Not one soul.
When I asked Marge, a local in her 60s who works for a remodeling company, she just laughed at first and said, “No, not at all.” She was handing out American flags at her booth and I pushed a bit, asking when she thought he had stopped being in charge, “About a year,” she said, “but it’s gotten worse and worse,” referring to Biden’s decline.
Mark and Bob, on the other hand, two farmers manning the American Legion table, don’t believe Biden has ever been in control, though they admit it is far more obvious now. So, who do they think is running things? “I don’t know, “Mark said, “maybe Obama, or some cabal, it’s never been Joe.”
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“This is Obama’s third term,” Bob chimed in without quite interrupting, as old friends do, “and if Kamala wins it will be his fourth term.”
Mark told me that he had not always been a firm Trump supporter, and when I asked what had changed he told me, “When Trump spoke at the March for Life [in 2020] it meant a lot to me, no president ever had, we go almost every year.”
It was telling that what sold him on Trump was a personal choice by the former president, and a risky one, not a cookie-cutter focus grouped decision, but one that Mark believed was from Trump’s heart.
President Biden boards Air Force One as he departs Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, on July 23, 2024. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
They explained to me that Carroll is the reddest county in the Old Line State, and it felt that way. There were Trump shirts here and there, flags everywhere, not a whole lot of vegan options at the food stalls, no kale was present unless on display, it certainly didn’t feel like I was in a blue state.
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Congressional candidate Kim Klacik is looking to take advantage of that by vying, as a Republican, for the open seat being left by Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger, and owing to redistricting in 2022, the website 538 has moved the district from strong blue to lean blue.
“This is Obama’s third term,” Bob chimed in without quite interrupting, as old friends do. “And if Kamala wins it will be his fourth term.”
It’s still a bit of a long shot, but as Klacik campaigned alongside Board of Education candidate Dr. Greg Malveaux it was clear she has a following in the area. “I hear you on the radio,” one middle-aged man came up and said to her, “You make a lot of sense.”
All politics is local, so the conversations included education — I spotted a Moms for Liberty tent nearby, they are becoming ubiquitous — as well as a controversial plan by Democrats to run power lines with giant towers through people’s farms, supposedly to save the environment.
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Time and again the folks I talked to came back to the national political scene. They have not moved on from the assassination attempt against Trump as much of the media seem to have, and at least one person I spoke to is suspicious about the role of the Secret Service and the FBI.
What was notable about the consensus that Biden had been put out to pasture, much like the prize Heifers in the livestock displays, is that there was no real sense of shock or fear or anger, more of a resigned attitude that we are simply governed by committee now.
Nobody I spoke to particularly liked Vice President Kamala Harris, but they also didn’t seem to hate her, it was more like she was irrelevant, just a figurehead who could almost be anyone.
I got the strong sense, not for the first time since Biden bowed out, that in some voters’ minds this has become a choice not between Trump and Harris but between Trump and the deep state.
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I had brought my son along, it was a fair, after all, and back at my car he realized he’d lost his phone. I thought it was probably over at the picnic table where we ate, and sure enough, there it was. A gentleman there in a trucker cap with his family handed it to me and said, “We’ve been passing it off, figured someone would come back for it.”
I handed it to my son, and said, “Be more careful,” trying to sound stern, but kind of laughing to myself, thinking, you’re really not in Brooklyn anymore.